Tag Archives: Ann Sterzinger

Turning Cynicism into Optimism 1

by • Health and Medicine, Strategy • Tags:

A review of Disaster Fitness: Make Your Demons Do the Work, by Ann Sterzinger and Ann Hedonia.

Disaster Fitness: Make Your Demons Do the Work by [Sterzinger, Ann, Hedonia, Ann]

By Keith Preston

I confess to having never been a fan of so-called “self-help” books. Mostly, these kinds of works have always struck me as having goofy titles and charlatans for authors, and nothing of any real value. Some years ago, I was involved with a company where my division head used to hand out copies of Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking, a quasi-Christian work written in 1952, for Christ’s sake (no pun intended). It was a book my supervisor seemed to think was vitally important for his staff members to read. The same guy used to hand out copies of books by Joel Osteen (WTF?). Most self-help books are based to some degree on the model that Peale made a fortune from in the mid-twentieth century. Just throw out a lot of cheery-sounding sloganeering, combined with some quasi-Christian or quasi-Buddhist or hippie New Age nonsense, plus some basic common sense ideas that everyone over the age of fifteen ought to be able to figure out anyway. Do all this while claiming to possess some special path to financial success, spiritual enlightenment, and good health, and you’ve got an instant best-seller so long as you’re willing to pay for advertising space in the National Enquirer.

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How the Internet Has Created a Swamp of Very Loud Sheep Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right, Uncategorized • Tags:

Losers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose because you’re already losers.

By Ann Sterzinger

If you’re a digital native, you probably have no idea what genuine loneliness is. Before you get off my lawn, let me finesse that (oh, god, Ann, finessing anything on the Internet is always your first mistake): back during the analog age, if you were a freak or a weirdo, you were a freak or a weirdo. Period. That was it. No way out. No online community of equally gothy souls. Even if you went to some big nice suburban high school, you weren’t going to do much better than being Duckie from Pretty in Pink.

The downside of this is that you were sad.

The upside of this is that you learned to live with the various feelings you get when no one else will back up or even understand your thoughts and opinions.

Weirdos got used to being weirdos. And after a while, we liked it. When we finally escaped home and found the other oddballs in a slightly larger town, we tended to cobble punk rock scenes or the like out of whomever happened to be in the immediate area. Which meant that restricting your social life to people with your own politics or taste or thoughts was fucking impossible; you settled for hanging out with anyone who thought anything at all instead of shuffling through life like quiet sheep.

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Funding the Enemy: War and Welfare Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Immigration, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism, Religion and Philosophy, Strategy • Tags:

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From March last year: Ann Sterzinger’s libertarian solution to the Islamist problem.

The welfare state is a gravy train for ISIS.

If the welfare state doesn’t end in Europe, the welfare state will end Europe. And future historians will look back on the way the West ended and think we were all out of our goddamn minds.

As the dust is still clearing in Brussels and Pakistan (killing kids on Easter… stay classy, ISIS) and wherever else the nut jobs hit before this goes to press—as the Left signals their concern that all these dead bodies and raped orificia might feed an irrational fear of suicide bombers and rapists—the press is busy lecturing European security agencies about their incompetence. They could have stopped all these attacks somehow, if only they knew how to do their jobs!

You know what? I feel sorry for the security agencies, bumbling though they may allegedly be. From where I’m sitting, their job looks freakin’ impossible. According to Pew, over a third of French Muslims think suicide bombing is at least on occasion acceptable (and among the 18-30 crowd, it’s an eye-watering 42 percent).

How would you like it to be your job to root out terrorists when a third of the base population—of whose diversity and feelings you must always be respectful—would be happy to house and hide the assholes you’re looking for?

Meanwhile the media have kept stumping for not just bringing more of the terrorist-supporting population in, but feeding and housing them at the expense of the very government budget that must also fund security operations.

I know, only a bad person would ever suggest that you end welfare, and no educated European wants to be a bad person. But what you are accomplishing by being too nice is very bad indeed, Europe. Because if you do not end the welfare state, you’re going to have a violent genocide, one way or another.

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NO CONFIDENCE: Vote for Yourself Reply

by • American Decline, Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Electoralism/Democratism, Immigration, Law/Justice, Left and Right, Police State/Civil Liberties, Religion and Philosophy • Tags:

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In the face of a particularly pitiful election selection, Ann Sterzinger makes the case for giving oneself the first and final vote.

Personally, were I American, I’d either just stay home or turn up only to draw a cock on the ballot paper, in line with my anti-democratic precedent (#Brexit exempted). Still, I suppose voting for oneself, or “no confidence”, works as another way to inoculate oneself from the pozz of the team-sport/herd-animal mentality undergirding electoral politics.

Also: Hurhur…she said “minge”….

~MRDA~

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Why I’m Scared of Widows & Orphans 2

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Immigration, Left and Right, Men and Women, Military, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism, Religion and Philosophy • Tags:

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Islam, immigration, and interventionism.

I’ll be incorporating a response to the Ann-xieties expressed here (and elsewhere) into a future Infernal episode.

There’s a lot of raspberrying and dismissiveness in the debate over whether to let the wave of “Syrian” “refugees” wash up on U.S. shores. In the partisan sandbox-fights to which we tend to reduce even the most serious questions, it’s easy to forget that in a case like this, there is probably a strong moral argument to be made on either side.

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The Magical Bottomless Labor Pool Reply

by • American Decline, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Electoralism/Democratism, Immigration, Law/Justice, Left and Right, Men and Women, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism, Religion and Philosophy • Tags:

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The Princess of Pessimism, Ann Sterzinger, on labour and…er, labour.

1,950 words

A few months back, publisher Chip Smith asked me to write a new intro for the upcoming second edition of my 2011 novel NVSQVAM. To write the essay I had to rethink my protagonist, Lester Reichartsen, whose youth and dreams came to a screeching halt when his girlfriend slyly quit taking her birth control pills.

Reviewers’ response to Lester’s depressive and unenthusiastic assumption of the role of family man surprised me. Many a columnist—both liberal and conservative, those who loved the book and those who hated it—declared him a disgusting human being.

Pushing aside the fact that the phrase “disgusting human being” may be redundant, I was forced to confront the contrast between reader responses and my own underlying assumption: that Lester is no more horrible than anyone else.

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…And Then They Came for the Tech Workers Reply

by • American Decline, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Immigration, Race and Ethnicity, Science and Technology • Tags:

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From RightOn: Labour-market laughs and lamentations mit Ann Sterzinger.

Y’all in Europe might find it a challenge to accommodate all of your new friends right now, but there’s hope: on this side of the pond, the native-born American worker just scored a massive coup, I tell you what.

A couple of weeks ago, there was a bit of a hullaballoo when SunTrust Banks in Atlanta decided to take advantage of our government’s generous H-1B special occupational visa program. The H-1B visa is a great boon to the American economy, allowing companies to replace their spoiled, entitled, costly native-born skilled labor force with cheaper, more compliant computer programmers, IT assistants, and scientists from countries like India.

It’s not that Indian people are innately more charitable toward their great and benevolent employers than Americans, mind you; but people who are in the country on an H-1B visa can’t change jobs without risking deportation, so they have to shut up and take what they’re given. The ideal employee!

But that wasn’t what made the news; such abuses of the H-1B are becoming commonplace. Just as humdrum was the way SunTrust humiliated the American employees they were firing by making them train their own replacements.

But then SunTrust pushed their luck a bit too far.

Showcasing both their lack of esteem for the American employees’ years of service and their lack of confidence in their cheap new workers’ ability to hit the ground running, SunTrust stuck a “continuing cooperation” clause in the severance agreement.

If they wanted severance pay, the rejected workers had to agree to donate their own time to step in and provide emergency help if something went wrong—for NO ADDITIONAL PAY.

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Horizontal Collaboration 1

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Immigration, Left and Right, Men and Women, Military, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism, Race and Ethnicity, Religion and Philosophy, Sexuality and the State • Tags:

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A raunchily revisionist review by Ann Sterzinger. Sheds more light on the Conflict Without Heroes that was World War II.

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Is present-day Paris more puritanical than it was under the Nazis?

I’d love to simply dwell on the jaunty visual attractiveness—not to mention the entertainment and historical value—of author Mel Gordon’s recent coffee table book from Feral House press, Horizontal Collaboration: The Erotic World of Paris 1920-1946. It’s by turns a joyful and critical account of the legal sex industry in Paris before, during, and after the two world wars.

I’d also prefer to avoid painting myself into a corner as “That one lady who spends weeks at a time wondering aloud about what the French are going to do with all their enthused new Muslims.”

But as the EU brass continue prying national borders open to everyone who can fit on a boat, it’s almost impossible to read an account of Paris, sex, and the Nazi occupation without one’s mind wandering to Paris, sex, and the new theocrappation.

…Although the extent of said theocrappation depends on how you interpret some viscerally shocking poll data. For instance: does 3 percent of a sample of the French population responding “very favorably” to ISIS while 13 percent respond “rather favorably” add up to 15 percent of the electorate backing ISIS? You parse the adverbs.

But in any case, as my dear departed friend Lisa Falour used to say: Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke. (An influx of radical Muslims is comedy gold, in fact; just as France was running out of humorless Catholics, here comes the new boss…)

I am, however, aware that reductio ad Hitlerum is a running gag with all the kids these days; therefore, I shall drive straight on to reductio praeter Hitlerum.

Because if the research in this book is anything like accurate—and Feral House’s longtime reputation might imply that it is—it sounds like the Nazis were more tolerant of, if not titillated by, Parisian sexual culture than our new friends the jihadis.

Then again, the Nazis were also more fun, sexually speaking, than the native French feminists in all apparent likelihood, so there’s that to chew on as well… Not to mention the fact that the Nazi stormtroopers supposedly acted less rapey in gay Paree than the heroic American GIs who came to chase them away.

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Octave Mirbeau on Voting Reply

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Electoralism/Democratism, Religion and Philosophy • Tags: ,

Ann Sterzinger‘s translation of a poll-dodging polemic by 19th century French anarchist and author Octave Mirbeau. Warms the cockles of my cold, anti-democratic heart….

Also, be sure to check out her translation of his novel In the Sky, available for the first time in English from Nine-Banded Books.

~MRDA~

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One thing amazes me prodigiously—I’d say it stuns me: that even during the scientific era in which I write, after umpteen examples, after all the newspaper scandals, there can still exist, in our dear France (as they say in the budget committee), a voter, one single voter—that irrational creature, unnatural and hallucinatory—who consents to interrupting his affairs, his dreams, or his pleasures, to go vote in favor or anything or anyone.

If you think for one second, isn’t this surprising phenomenon the perfect way to derail the most subtle philosophies and muddle our reason? Where is the new Balzac who will describe for us the physiognomy of the modern voter? Or the Charcot who will explain the anatomy and the mentality of this incurable nutjob?

We’re waiting!

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So Where Are the Feminists? Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Immigration, Men and Women, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism, Race and Ethnicity, Religion and Philosophy • Tags:

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Ann Sterzinger asks the question at RightOn, spotlighting how the clash in the feminist worldview between “Enlightenment Person” and “Mommy Goddess” curtails any meaningful criticism of the more predatory and illiberal residents of Dar al-Islam. I notice the bifurcation a lot in abortion debates, where feminists talk about personal autonomy with one breath only to endorse the subjugation of unwilling fathers to the wombocracy with the next; and let’s not get into the decidedly maternalist bent of feminist anti-sex-industry campaigns.

Of course, the mistake made here is taking the feminist “equality” spiel at face value, instead of simply acknowledging the special pleading that forms the backbone of the ideology. On a related note, I’m somewhat wary of the reports of a “rape epidemic” in Scandinavia, given not only the prevalence of feminist dogma, but also expanded definitions of “rape”, the possibility of false/mistaken reports, and questionable reporting procedures (particularly in Sweden); it certainly raises the question of how embellished the “epidemic” is by such factors.

Why do radical feminists remain silent on the issue of mass immigration into Europe, in spite of the fact that the statistics show that European women are among its primary victims?

I’m not the first to ask this, but the more times it gets asked, the better.

During this debate on just how we’re going to get millions of Muslim migrants settled in Europe—since Europe’s politicians apparently have never seriously considered the option of actually securing their borders—where the hell are the feminists?

Because rape is bad, right?

Have they read the rape statistics regarding the millions of devout Muslims who are already ensconced in the Land of the Unbeliever?

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Robert Stark interviews Ann Sterzinger Reply

by • Arts & Entertainment, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Immigration, Left and Right, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism, Religion and Philosophy • Tags:

Ann Sterzinger Returns!

Ann Sterzinger

Topics include:

Trigger Warning, her new project with Rachel Haywire

The Pros and Cons of Child Abuse

Why she is a “radical moderate” and why it’s foolish to subscribe to any ideology in its entirety

Why people feel a need to be part of a political team that will support them and how it’s difficult to be politically homeless

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Robert Stark interviews Ann Sterzinger Reply

by • American Decline, Arts & Entertainment, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Left and Right, Men and Women, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism, Race and Ethnicity, Religion and Philosophy • Tags:

Robert Stark interviews Ann Sterzinger

ann-sterzinger

Ann Sterzinger is a writer, publisher of HOPELESS BOOKS , and Editor of Takimag .

Topics include:

Her Catholic upbringing and how she lost faith in religion

Her career in Journalism as a proofreader and freelance writer

The upper middle class women who dominate the journalism industry and why Ann finds them alienating

The modern left and how it has become dominated by upper class boutique issues as opposed to class issues

Why introvert writers develop dark alter egos in their work

Anti-Natalism and the tragedy of the human existence.

Her response to arguments against Anti-Natalism (ex. “Idiocracy” and ethno nationalism)

Her book NVSQVAM (Nowhere)

Her book The Talkative Corpse: A Love Letter

The concept of loserdom; Genuine losers vs. situation losers and those in between